Women In Public Service Conference

US Secretary of Labor, Elaine Chao, told an audience of several hundred women yesterday, that women make up more of the workforce than ever before.

“And the driver behind these numbers is that women are accessing education, especially higher education in unprecedented numbers. Today American women complete high school at rates that are higher than the completion rate of men and they’re, women, are more likely to enter and graduate from college than men.”

Chao spoke before the 16^th annual Southern Women in Public Service conference in Nashville.

But only 23-percent of state legislative offices are held by women, one indicator of how well women are moving into the public sector. Most states in the south, including Tennessee, lag behind that national average.

Wendy Pitts Reeves is from Maryville, and she’s running for county commission in Blount County. She says the conference lets women learn from other women already holding public offices.

“And the cool part is that they are ordinary people like you and like me who are doing extraordinary things and I came home from this conference last year thinking for the first time in my life thinking ‘maybe!,’ ‘who knows?’ and a year later I’m running for county commission in my town.”

19-percent of the seats in the Tennessee state legislature are held by women.